


at dusk beneath a diabetic moon

by beanierose



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: F/F, but make it gay, hello everyone care for a monster of the week au?, this is basically a love letter to the x files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-19 08:50:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22575091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose
Summary: a buzzfeed unsolved/x files au. katya hunts cryptids. trixie doesn’t believe in them, but she believes in katya
Relationships: Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova
Comments: 110
Kudos: 170





	1. our town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am enormously grateful as always to [sophie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mattepinkallshades), [shea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joanneelizabeth) and [conny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/connyhascontrol) for being so supportive and encouraging, and letting me talk their ears off about this iteration of our girls. i feel very blessed to have you. and [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter), i will never be able to thank you enough. for cheering me on, for making me a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5TOYis55a6ytGRXKzcDWZK?si=6DdXzbAXTJiMOak29wTvag), for beta reading, for being such a bright spot of joy in my life. thank you, thank you, thank you.

The title is from the song _Bigfoot!_ by The Weakerthans

* * *

Katya feels at her absolute sexiest and most gay sitting in the Wrangler with her elbow propped against the window frame, smoking a cigarette and waiting for Trixie. She will get off work at the salon in just a few minutes. Katya has her own duffel and Trixie’s pink hard-shell suitcase in the trunk, and a stack of cassettes for Trixie to choose from. It’s the sacrifice she has to make in order to enjoy the aesthetic of the vintage Jeep, that she can’t annoy Trixie with endless playlists of 90s Russian pop on Spotify. They make do, and she doesn’t mind letting Trixie choose what they listen to.

While she’s waiting, Katya replies to a few tweets asking for a hint about her next investigation. People are still sending her memes from the last time, grainy, crazy-looking ones, the ones Trixie tells her are called _deep fried_. She doesn’t super understand them, not always, but she listens when Trixie tells her how important it is to engage. How that will help to grow her audience.

Trixie is kind of bossy, and Katya likes it a lot. She’s her best friend, since college, and when Trixie graduated and Katya was two years out of school and still just working in the costume store, she didn’t hesitate to follow Trixie out west. All of this was Katya’s idea, but they wouldn’t be where they are without Trixie pushing, Trixie organising, Trixie taking moody, verdant photographs of the back of Katya’s head for Instagram.

Katya keeps her replies as cryptic as she possibly can, and when people start tweeting at Trixie as well to ask her for details, she locks her phone again and puts it away. She drums her fingers against the outside of the car and watches people walking by, some of them looking at her. A man walking a dog goes right past the Jeep, only a couple inches away from her, and Katya almost topples headfirst out of the rolled down window to get to scratch the puppy’s snout. After he’s gone, Katya lifts her hand to her nose and breathes in the dog-smell of her fingers, lives there in that secret shame for a little while.

All of the girls come out of the salon at the same time at the end of each day, and Katya likes so much to watch them. Trixie is a head taller than everybody else and there are cute little wisps of hair escaping her ponytail to frame her round, lovely face. She’s laughing with one of her colleagues, her mouth open so wide that Katya can see all of her back teeth even from the other side of the street. When Trixie turns around and sees the car she gives Katya a small wave and comes across the street with a little bounce in her step, her ponytail swishing behind her. Katya picks up the Del Taco bag from the seat so that Trixie can sit down, and hands it to her once she has her seatbelt fastened.

“Oh, my god. I literally love you. Thank you. Hi.” Trixie is always starving when she gets off work and she begins rummaging through the bag right away.

Katya starts the engine and the car rumbles to life beneath them. “Hello, hi, hello, how are you, how was your day?”

“It was just okay. That WASP woman came in again, you remember from last month?” Katya hums a small noise of confirmation. “She won’t let anybody else wash her hair. I had to do it, even though I _told her_ that I’m a senior fuckin’ stylist.” Trixie stuffs a handful of fries in her mouth and chews politely, swallows them down before she finishes talking. “I’m supposed to supervise and delegate.”

“Uh-huh,” Katya says. “Trixie, honey, you gotta stop trying to convince people that you’re a top.”

Trixie shrieks and strains against her seatbelt like she wants to lunge across the centre console and finally throttle Katya. Her mascara is coming off in little flakes underneath her eyes, and the pink tip of her nose is showing through her foundation. She’s tired, Katya knows, and she’d love to go home and sink into a warm bath, her skin made slippery and soft by all of the special products she puts into the water. Instead she’s here, in Katya’s beat-up old car, already rummaging through the shoebox of cassettes in the passenger footwell.

She chooses Kate Bush, and she has another couple of tapes picked out for when this one finishes that she’s keeping tucked underneath her thigh like she thinks Katya might take them from her. Trixie fishes around in the glove compartment for a pencil and sticks it through the sprocket to wind the tape back to the start, the tip of her tongue just poking out because she’s concentrating so hard.

After she’s done and the staticky voices of Dan Brandenstein and NASA fill the car, Trixie offers Katya one of her crinkle cut fries. Katya munches on it cheerfully while she checks her mirrors and pulls out of their parking spot. Trixie is eating her veggie burrito with one hand and taking the scrunchie out of her hair with the other.

Katya hasn’t yet grown tired of Trixie’s whole post-work routine. After she’s done eating, Trixie wriggles out of her black blouse and slacks in the passenger seat. She had left a change of clothes for herself neatly folded on top of her suitcase, and Katya had let herself in to Trixie’s apartment with her spare key earlier today to collect everything. She saw a pepto-bismol Post-it tacked to the door of the refrigerator to remind Trixie’s roommate, Kim, that she needs to give the chinchilla food and fresh water every day that Trixie is away. Katya likes Trixie’s writing, how she dots the i in Kim’s name with a little heart. Her own is scrawling and messy as chicken scratch.

It isn’t a graceful production for Trixie to get dressed again, and Katya focuses very hard on the road ahead so Trixie doesn’t get all embarrassed and grumpy. She doesn’t put her boots on after she’s dressed, instead propping her feet up on the dash in their wool socks. She pushes her toes against the glass of the windshield until they crack and she moans loudly. Katya is so grateful that Trixie comes with her at all for these trips, and especially after ten hours on her feet.

After some time spent massaging her arches and groaning, Trixie takes her iPad out of her backpack and starts scrolling around in their shared Google document. They’ve been researching and collecting information. Katya has been reading everything she can get her hands on and making notes for Trixie, highlighting the parts that she thinks are especially interesting.

“You know,” Trixie says, and taps two fingers against her chin. “This might be the first time that I kinda believe in the thing that we’re looking for.”

Katya turns her head for just a moment to glance at Trixie. The sun is setting on Katya’s left, and she likes the idea of Trixie looking back at her and seeing the sky peach-pink and luminous behind her. “You do?”

“Yeah! Bigfoot is meat and bone, Katya.”

She sounds so emphatic that Katya laughs out loud, a small sharp thing that reverberates around the inside of the car for long enough that she almost winds down the window again to let it back out. That would be less than wise; it’s raining. And it’s begun to get dark. Katya doesn’t like driving very much, likes it even less in these conditions. When it’s sunny and dry and warm, she will hold the wheel down at six in just one hand and rest the other on the window frame or sometimes along the back of Trixie’s seat. Tonight she has a firm grip with both hands and she’s focusing so hard on the road she keeps catching herself leaning forward.

“I know this,” Katya says. “I didn’t think that you did. I was super ready to have to persuade you with all my extensive and incredibly scientific and — Trixie, _and_ — one hundred percent factual research.”

Trixie has elongated in the seat as they’ve been driving. She’s reclined it way back and she still has her feet propped up on the dash. The blood is definitely not reaching them correctly, and when she gets out of the car later she’s going to whine and hop around like a little sparrow until her circulation comes back. She has the iPad resting against the slope of her thighs and she scrolls back up to the top of the document again.

“Like how the earliest recorded sightings are from the fifteenth century? And how lots of cultures have different names for the same idea? Hmm? Those facts?”

“Those _are_ facts!” Katya starts, and then sees Trixie right at the edge of her vision, barely suppressing a smirk. Her cheeks have hollowed with the effort and her eyes are wide. “Wow, I hate you so much.”

Trixie reads a little more of their research out loud, like Katya wasn’t the one who compiled all of it. Like she hasn’t already drafted her tweets for later with the most important details. She hardly minds; she likes the way Trixie’s voice sounds. She’s turned the volume down on the cassette player a bit, so that she can tell Katya about how there have been sightings in almost every state, how that lends credence to the idea that Bigfoot is a species, rather than a singular creature.

“Well _yeah_ , honey. You look in the mirror lately?”

Trixie screams and drums her heels against the dashboard, squirming around in her seat. Katya’s laughing too, and she relaxes her grip on the steering wheel a bit. Just having Trixie next to her in the car always makes her feel safer, which doesn’t make any sense at all because she has on more than one occasion lunged across the centre console and put her hands around Katya’s throat while they’ve been driving.

“That’s so mean. You’re so _mean_. I can’t believe I’m friends with you.” She’s taken her sunglasses off now that it’s gotten darker, and she folds the legs in neatly and puts them away in their pink case, stows it in the glove compartment.

Katya grins. “Well, I _am_ a cryptid hunter. I’m one of the few people that believe you exist. So you don’t really have another option.”

“ _Okay_ , I got it, thanks so much,” Trixie says.

She gets into a bit of a snit and draws her legs up onto her seat, folds them beneath herself instead. There’s only twenty more minutes or so until they get to where they’re going, so Katya leaves her to work through it by herself in furious silence. It’s unkind to provoke her after a long work day. Katya should have known better; she _does_ know better.

“Hey,” she says, after a handful of minutes in which she has to be very careful not to turn her head towards Trixie. “You’re very pretty.”

“I _know_.” It comes out sharp, but then her face softens into a smile. She uncrosses her arms and stretches them up above her head, as high as the roof of the Wrangler will let her.

They’re driving along the main street through the town now. Even in the dark and the rain it’s pretty cute, the street lined with trees and low, single-storey buildings. Behind them, the mountains sweep upward so steeply that it makes Katya dizzy when she leans forward towards the windshield to try and see the top.

“This place is kinda charming. If you’re into like, mildew and cheap beer,” Trixie says.

Katya swings a right into the parking lot of the motel and cuts the engine. “You know those are my two main interests. You think we’ll have time to go apartment hunting while we’re here?”

“Since when do you want to live like a person?” Trixie lifts both eyebrows. She always looks so pleased with herself whenever she gets a chance to tease Katya, and her mouth is turned up at the corners so the dimple in her left cheek is more pronounced. “We’ll get you a nice tarp and an extra pair of wool socks.”

“Oh wow, two pairs? A life of true decadence.”

Trixie doesn’t respond; she’s begun rummaging in her footwell, collecting all of her belongings. It usually takes less than five minutes of her being in Katya’s car before her stuff is scattered everywhere, but she is always courteous, always careful to take everything with her when she gets out. While she’s occupied, Katya jumps down without using the step and rounds the front of the Jeep to open Trixie’s door for her and offer her a hand. She doesn’t need it — she’s taller than Katya is — but she never refuses.

“We can’t stay someplace nice?” Trixie says, looking over the top of Katya’s head. The red neon _Vacancy_ sign is making her face look warm and pink and sweet. “Just one time?”

“You wanna pay?” Katya says back.

Trixie squawks in distaste and Katya leaves her there, leaning against the side of the Wrangler and shifting her weight in agitation while the blood comes back into her feet. She gets their luggage out of the trunk and takes everything inside, Trixie trailing a few paces behind with just her little pink backpack.

Katya is the kind of person who says _thank you_ to Siri whenever she asks a question, and Trixie is the kind of person who giggles at her every time for doing it. Because of this, Katya is always the one to speak with the person at the front desk and smile politely and collect their room keys, while Trixie busies herself a few feet away. She thumbs through the racks of leaflets advertising things to do in the surrounding area. Almost all of it is Bigfoot-adjacent, and Trixie certainly won’t find anything interesting enough to make her actually pick one out.

The moment they get into their room, Trixie unzips her suitcase and heads straight for the bathroom with a thing of Clorox wipes. She does this every time, and Katya can hear her singing cheerfully to herself while she scrubs the sink or whatever, so she leaves her to it. It gives her a minute to stretch out after the drive. Katya sits down right on the floor, even though it will make Trixie click her tongue in disgust, and moves easily through a few simple poses.

It feels good; she likes the way that it kind of burns when she pushes her hip flexors as far as she can. Her hair is spilling down all over her face and getting into her eyes, and she has a red scrunchie around her wrist but she doesn’t want to shift out of downward-facing dog to tie it up. After a couple minutes her legs start tingling and she brings them down and sits up, gathers as much of her hair up as she can. It only skims the top of her shoulders and it always wants to fall down and stick in sweaty tendrils to her cheeks and neck.

“Get off the floor,” Trixie says when she comes out of the bathroom. “You’re gonna get hepatitis.”

Katya lifts her head from her plow pose to look at Trixie. “I think that would be very sexy of me. Will you nurse me, Trixie? Will you tenderly pat my forehead with a cool facecloth?”

“I’ll smother you with a pillow.”

Sweat is beginning to prickle between Katya’s shoulder blades and make her back feel all itchy and unpleasant. She flops down flat onto the floor and Trixie steps carefully over her and sits herself primly on the end of one of the twin beds. She has a way of always, immediately, making the places they stay feel more like home. It’s not like she brings a bunch of scented candles, although Katya doesn’t doubt that she would if she thought she could get away with it. Just her presence in a space is enough to make it feel warmer and cosier and more pink.

Everything in Trixie’s suitcase is organised carefully into packing cubes, and when Katya opens her duffel and things start falling out onto the ground Trixie sighs loudly. Katya rummages around until she finds her dopp kit and she holds it aloft, victorious.

“I’m gonna shower. I am feeling extremely gross from the drive.”

“You’re extremely gross from who you are as a person.” Trixie has taken her boots off and wriggled up the bed so that she’s leaning against the headboard now. Her hair is a bit matted at the back from their long drive, and her makeup is smudged and wearing away. “I’m gonna call and check in with Orville.”

Katya’s knees both crack loudly when she straightens up and she winces. “Cool. Say hello to our son from me.”

“He’s not your son, Cruella,” Trixie fires back at her before Katya closes the bathroom door.

The spray from the showerhead is lacklustre, and Trixie is definitely going to be unhappy about that when she washes her hair tomorrow. It makes Katya laugh just thinking about it and some of the water gets into her mouth.

Freshly dressed, she comes out of the bathroom to see Trixie laying on her stomach on her bed, grinning at the screen of her phone. She’s on FaceTime, and Kim has propped her own phone up against the chinchilla's cage so that Trixie can watch Orville eat. Katya likes that Trixie doesn’t stop her soft voice or her goofy smile when she comes into the room. She leans down over Trixie to put her face in the frame as well. When Trixie first announced one day that she was going to get a chinchilla and dragged Katya to the pet store to help carry everything, she hadn’t really understood the appeal. She gets it now. Orville sits on his hind legs and holds a grass pellet in his front paws to nibble at delicately, and Katya and Trixie watch him eat.

Katya had been with Trixie the day she got Orville from the rescue center. She’d been the one to drive back to Trixie’s apartment, and she’s pretty sure that was the closest she’ll ever come in her life to the feeling of driving home from the hospital with a newborn in the car seat. Trixie had cradled the carrier in both arms and sung softly to the chinchilla, so that he could get used to her voice. Now he’s inquisitive and goofy, and he likes to ride around on Katya’s shoulder whenever she’s over at Trixie’s place.

After a little while, Kim comes back into frame and tells them she has to hang up now but that she’ll check in later, before she goes to bed. “You’re a really good dad,” Katya says, and then darts rapidly off the bed and out of range so that Trixie can’t smack her.

She sits up and gathers all of her hair up off her neck in both hands, rolls her head on her shoulders. “You’re his dad. I’m a MILF. Can we get snacks?”

“Really?” Katya sits at the end of her own bed to start putting her Docs back on. “Watching him eat those nasty-ass dried-up pellets made you hungry, Trix?”

“No, being in a confined space with you for multiple hours made me hungry. Come on, there’s a gas station down the street.”

Katya trots obediently along behind Trixie on their way to the gas station. She looks like a confection, like something made of fondant or marzipan. She’s totally out of place in a town like this. It’s still raining, and it’s hovering right around forty degrees. Trixie’s wearing a white down jacket and she’s got her hands shoved inside the pockets and her chin tucked into the neck of the coat. When she put it on Katya told her she looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and she stuck her tongue out.

“Trixie, you know, you really shouldn’t dress like a snack when we’re out looking for enormous carnivorous beasts.” Katya quickens her pace to catch up to Trixie and hooks her arm through hers.

Trixie scoffs. “He’s not carnivorous, is he? Has there been one single confirmed report of a Bigfoot attacking a person? Ever?”

“Well no, but-”

“Mhmm.” Trixie stops them walking in front of the door to the gas station and Katya lets go of her arm so she can open it and hold it for Trixie.

Inside, several people turn to look at them. Trixie reaches blindly behind herself and circles her wrist until Katya takes her hand and allows herself to be led over to the snack aisle. She likes how every decision Trixie makes is properly considered, how she bends at the waist to assess their options before she picks anything out. She passes things to Katya one at a time for her to hold, until she’s satisfied. She started with the biggest thing of Skittles the store carries, which Katya is cradling against her stomach while she waits. Katya follows Trixie over to the registers and dumps everything out on the counter; a Red Bull can starts rolling and Trixie catches it as it drops off the edge and sets it down securely again.

“You girls in town for the squatch?” the older man at the register asks as he starts ringing them up. His gaze lingers on Trixie for a little while. She unzipped her jacket because it’s warm in the store, and underneath she’s wearing a pink roll neck sweater. She doesn’t much look like a typical amateur cryptozoologist.

It makes her let out a small disgruntled noise and she wanders away a bit. Katya bounces on her toes a couple times and clasps her hands together. “We sure are! You got any insider information?”

“Just don’t getcha selves lost in the forest,” he sighs. “Bring plenty’a supplies, water, nineteen forty-seven, and cell phones don’t work so you need’a use short-wave radio.”

Katya blinks at him a couple times and then says _Oh!_ and rummages in the back pocket of her pants for her wallet. It was a gift from Trixie a few years back and the leather has been made soft and buttery with use. Inside, there’s a Polaroid of the two of them. They’re at the beach in it, Trixie in a vintage one piece and an enormous straw sunhat. Katya’s wearing a bikini with a shark print and she’s tucked beneath the brim of Trixie’s hat, leaning in to kiss her cheek. It sends a little sting of pleasure through her each time she sees it; Trixie had gifted the wallet to her with the photograph already inside.

“Here you go,” she says cheerfully, and hands the guy her card to swipe. “We’ve got radios and rations, don’t worry. We’ve put some thought into this. I guess you guys must have folks getting themselves stuck and needing rescued all the time, huh?”

The guy makes a gruff noise and passes her the receipt to sign. She can feel Trixie’s eyes on her, feel how she’s itching to get out of here. Trixie uses all of her reserves of small talk for her job and generally doesn’t enjoy engaging with people outside of work. Katya is honoured that Trixie feels comfortable enough with her to be grouchy and quiet, that it doesn’t drain her energy when they spend time together.

“You ever see any signs yourself?” Katya asks the clerk as he’s packing up their stuff. He passes the paper bag over to her and she holds it against her chest in both arms and waits for an answer.

The guy gestures behind himself to a few blurry photographs tacked up on a corkboard with push pins in different colours. “You hear about that hoax that was uncovered over in Bluff Creek?” He says it like that wasn’t almost twenty years ago, and Katya nods enthusiastically.

“I did!” She listens as he tells her to check out the museum in town, and that they should be careful not to find themselves in the forest after dark. He’s growing more and more animated as Katya lets him ramble, and she has to shift the weight of the grocery bag to her other arm.

Trixie has circumnavigated the store while she’s waited for Katya to get done talking to the guy, and she comes back to touch her fingers to Katya’s bent elbow and say her name very quietly and urgently. When they first met, Katya repeated Trixie’s name back to her and cracked it in half over her knee like a glow stick, and Trixie added an extra syllable to hers. _Kah-tee-yuh_. She likes the way that it sounds, especially when Trixie is getting annoyed or whiny.

“Okay, just a minute,” she says back calmly, as if she were trying to placate a child.

Katya thanks the guy at the register again and gestures with her head for Trixie to lead the way out of the store. She’s getting kind of stompy, so Katya trails a couple of steps behind on the way back to the motel. Trixie’s hands are balled into fists at her sides, but she’ll be okay once she eats a few Oreos and changes into her pajamas.

In their room, Katya unpacks the grocery bag and lays everything out on the dresser while Trixie changes in the bathroom. She likes pottering around and listening to the water running and the quiet hum of Trixie’s toothbrush, likes how Trixie’s face is bright and gleaming with lotion when she comes out.

“Par- _tay_ ,” Katya says, and shakes the bag of Skittles in Trixie’s direction.

She wrinkles her nose and collects a couple things to take with her when she gets beneath the sheets. Hers is the bed furthest away from the door, like always, and she props herself up against the headboard. Great clouds of freshly brushed-out curls cascade over her shoulders. Her hair is very soft; Katya knows this from the handful of times Trixie has gotten frustrated trying to do her own french braids and had Katya do them for her instead. Katya thinks she looks sort of like an earthworm, pink and shiny and moist, but knows better than to ever say that out loud.

“Hey, you know, that’s very Bigfoot of you,” she says as she comes over to sit on her own bed across from Trixie’s.

Trixie has arranged the various packages of junk food neatly across the sheets, in order of size from smallest to largest. She does the same thing with gifts, Katya remembers from her birthdays and that one Christmas neither of them could afford to go home and they spent the day on Trixie’s couch watching movies and eating until they were too bloated and uncomfortable to move.

“What is?”

“Arranging stuff all orderly like that.” Katya isn’t beneath the sheets yet, she’ll go out for a last cigarette, but she does reach down to unlace her boots. “You want me to go find you some rocks to stack?”

“I want you to never talk to me again,” Trixie says sweetly, and she rips open her Oreos and gets right to work twisting the cookies in opposite directions to separate the sandwich.

It doesn’t seem like the best idea to eat a whole bunch of sugar right before bed. Katya wants them to be up early to make the most of the daylight and she knows Trixie’s going to grumble, even though she’ll get at least an extra hour of sleep. Katya likes getting to wake Trixie with the wet ends of her hair dripping and her body pleasantly sore from a run, likes watching her come all grumpy and confused into the day. She is not about to tell Trixie to take it easy with the snacks, especially when she looks so cute munching on her cookies.

“I’m gonna go smoke,” Katya says, and Trixie makes a noncommittal noise.

She gathers her lighter and the pack of Camels from the pocket of her jacket and heads out the door of their room. They have a little patio area in the front with two Adirondack chairs and a small table and she settles herself down to light a cigarette. If she turns her head she can look in their window through the gap in the voile panels and see Trixie, scrolling through her phone and still eating.

They’re not far enough away from civilisation that she can see all of the stars, but there are way more than in the city. It’s so beautiful and so still, the rain coming down much lighter now. Katya likes the noises of the frogs very much. She would like to stay out here in her chair and listen to them until time stands still, and then maybe a little longer after that.

Her hair got damp again when they were walking back to the motel and she takes it down from the scrunchie so it can dry off a bit. It’s not even close enough to being warm enough for her to sit out like this, and she regrets not wearing a jacket. For a little while Katya inspects her own arm, fascinated by the way all of the blonde hairs are standing on end and how her skin feels like it’s on too tight.

After a while the light goes out in the room behind her. Katya isn’t usually the last one awake, but she really likes the idea of tiptoeing around and doing her best not to wake Trixie, maybe sneaking glances over at her. She’s on her second cigarette, and she’s trying so so hard, but she’s barely smoked at all today and she’s so content in the moment that she doesn’t want to go inside just yet. They’re so lucky to do this. She is so lucky, to have a best friend who will come along with her on these trips and take pictures and listen to her rambling and be the person she gets to turn to and say _did you see that?_

Their room faces away from the main street and she can almost make out the shape of the mountains. They seem much closer than she knows they really are, a huge hulking mass of deeper, more solid darkness. A little shiver goes through her thinking about how Bigfoot could be up there right now, maybe peering down, watching the lit end of her cigarette weave around in the dark like a firefly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can be found on [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie)! i'd love to hear what you thought ♡


	2. detour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My time in this fandom has brought me so many blessings, and I am surprised over and over again by my capacity to love and be loved. All my group chat babies - it is a bright spot of joy in my life that I'm lucky enough to know you, and I am grateful every day. 
> 
> And [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter). What you've shown me, what you've given me — the whole time we've known each other, but especially this week — has made my heart so full that I don't even know what I'm expected to do with myself. I _love_ you, and you are so precious to me. I will never be able to thank you enough.

The little town is remote, and they still have to drive a ways out of it to get up into the actual mountains. This morning, Katya jerked awake a handful of minutes before her alarm and her heart felt tight and loud as the skin of a drum. It’s too quiet here. It’s making her anxious. She was glad to turn off her alarm before it woke Trixie as well, and she let herself sit against the headboard with her knees drawn up to her chest and listen to Trixie snuffling for a while before she went for her run.

The whole drive up, Trixie had been groggy and not all the way awake in the passenger seat. She had clutched her travel mug of hot tea in both hands and rested her chin on top of it to try to get warm, and she’d hardly said a word. Katya had used that opportunity to rattle off a few more Bigfoot facts. Trixie had perked up when Katya told her Bigfoot is 7’10” and weighs about a thousand pounds, and said _Dad???_

Now that they’re here she’s more with it, and Katya’s even managed to make her smile a couple times already this morning. The two of them are doing their best to shelter beneath the open trunk of the Wrangler, a pointless endeavor since they’re going to get soaked as soon as they head into the forest anyway. It means they have to stand closer together than is typical for them, and Katya can smell sleepiness and Trixie’s perfume.

“What is that for?” Katya asks.

Trixie has been rummaging noncommittally in her backpack like she has something she doesn’t want Katya to see, but she’s finally given up and she pulls out a high-vis vest. “I didn’t super feel like getting shot today, so.”

“No one is gonna be up there hunting in all this rain.”

Katya double-checks that she has her water bottle and the camera and snacks. She keeps tapping her thumb against the screen of her phone to wake it, as if it will magically have bars this time. Trixie left hers back in their motel room, but they each have their two-way radios clipped to the waistband of their pants. When she straightens up again, Trixie has put the vest on. It’s outrageous that she still looks sweet and girlish in it, but Katya can’t help her giggling.

“Shut _up_!” Trixie glances down at herself and it makes her chin crease up. “Whatever! Have fun getting shot.”

Up here in the mountains in the green silence, Katya doesn’t let her usual pneumatic wheeze come rocketing out. She bites her bottom lip instead and hefts her backpack onto her back. Trixie has occasionally been in the background when Katya has gone live on Instagram, and she is credited as the photographer on all of the blog posts, but Katya is the only one who actually needs to look the part most of the time.

“If we run into him while you’re wearing that it’s going to scare him off, don’t you think?” Katya closes the trunk and locks the car, clips the keys onto the carabiner in the inside pocket of her jacket so they don’t fall out in the forest. “He’ll run right away.”

“Or he’ll be like, wow, what a colorful vest.”

Katya laughs again, and Trixie gets into a huff and stomps off ahead and through the tree line. It’s already overcast today and it only gets darker the further into the forest they go. The bank of the creek is swollen with all of the recent rainfall and it rushes noisily below them. Their breaths are fogging ahead of them and Katya amuses herself for a while trying to make the biggest cloud she can manage. Trixie studied a map this morning and plotted a route for them to follow, so Katya is just doing her best to stay in line behind her and not get too distracted.

She doesn’t think that Trixie is mad at her, not really. It’s just that it’s raining and it’s cold and Trixie really doesn’t like for her optimal conditions to be compromised. After twenty minutes or so of trailing several feet behind Trixie, Katya pulls her radio from her belt and holds down the button. She likes the crackling static noise it makes and she puts her mouth very close to the microphone, even though the person in the store that sold them to her told her she shouldn’t do that because it makes it more difficult to understand what’s being said.

“Trixie, it’s me.”

Instead of answering on the radio, Trixie just stops walking and turns around to look at Katya. “Yes? Is there something I can help you with?”

“Come back here.” Katya holds out a hand and wiggles her fingers. “I’m lonely.”

She doesn’t come closer, but she does stay right where she is and when Katya catches up to her she takes her offered hand. Trixie’s skin is cool and damp from the weather and Katya squeezes tight, hoping to share some of her warmth. It’s the good kind of cold today, the kind that makes Katya feel wide awake, makes her want to wind her arms around somebody’s neck and step in close. The tip of her nose and her cheeks feel taut and pink and she knows it makes her look cute because Trixie looks so flushed and pretty opposite her.

“Are you having a good time?” she asks.

Trixie snorts. “I am definitely here. With you.”

All of the rain is weighing down Katya’s bangs and making them stick to her forehead. She shakes her head like a dog to stop the water from dripping into her eyes, and Trixie yelps. She tries to stumble back out of the way but Katya is still holding tight to her hand and she can’t go far.

They start walking again, continuing uphill. Underfoot the ground is mossy and slippery and Katya has to concentrate hard to make sure she’s putting her feet in the right places. It’s not an easy trail — there’s really no trail to follow at all — so after a little while Trixie wriggles in Katya’s grip until she lets her have her hand back.

The further into the forest they get, the quieter it grows. There’s a rich smell of abundant plant life, a smell of greenness like when you snap the stem of something living. Katya has to keep her chin ducked down into the neck of her jacket, to stay warm and to try to keep the rainwater out of her eyes. She’s watching her step, being careful not to slip on the mulch underfoot. Ahead of her, Trixie is as determined and square-shouldered as ever. Katya likes trying to line her footsteps up with Trixie’s and fit inside the shoe prints she’s leaving.

Usually a forest like this would be alive with sound, but it’s so quiet and still. The leaves on all of the trees are heavy and drooping with rainwater. An occasional drip escapes to fall onto one of their heads and it makes Trixie shriek every time. The creek is so loud that it takes a little while for Katya to realise how much else is lacking. She and Trixie could be the only two alive in the whole world.

When Trixie finds a clearing she deems sufficiently photogenic, she takes the camera from her backpack and starts messing around with the settings. Katya doesn’t know a lot about it. She sits down on the mossy trunk of an old, felled tree and drinks some water from her bottle. Her hair is frizzy from the humidity and brittle from bleaching it every six weeks and she knows it’s probably not going to look very cute, but she also trusts Trixie to fix it so it’s decent for the photographs.

“Oh, whoa!” Katya says, and Trixie looks up from the camera’s display. “Trix, c’mere. Look.”

She comes over to the log and kneels down to see the little critter, frozen in place a foot or so away from where Katya is sitting. It has a long, shiny brown body dotted all over with little yellow spots. For a second Katya thought it was a snake and got excited, but it does have four stubby legs and it lifts one of its little feet in the air.

“Oh wow. Look at that.”

“What is it?” Katya’s voice is coming out all awed and breathy, and it’s pretty goofy but she can’t help it. She’s a city kid born and raised; she didn’t grow up in the backwoods of Wisconsin like Trixie did.

“A newt maybe? Or a salamander.” Trixie gets a little closer, careful not to spook it. “Look at him looking at you. Those beady little eyes? Girl.”

Katya laughs softly. “He looks like you.”

The noise Trixie makes is quiet and careful. Katya has always found Trixie to be her most charming when interacting with animals. She likes all of them, traps spiders from the bathtub in a cup with a piece of paper underneath so she can go down two flights of stairs and let them outside. Most of the time, Trixie really couldn’t be accused of having a calm energy, but when she has some furry little thing cradled in her cupped hands she gets slower and quieter and more awed.

She’s still holding the camera and she frames a couple of shots of the salamander, turns it around to let Katya look at the screen.

“Here, you hold it. I wanna try something.”

Katya accepts the camera and watches as Trixie holds out her hand in front of the salamander, flat and still. It takes a few long moments, but then he wriggles forward until he’s resting in Trixie’s palm.

“Oh, wow,” Trixie says. When she lifts her head to look at Katya she’s grinning open-mouthed like a little kid. “Look, Katya! He likes me.”

“I’m looking, Trix.”

Katya takes a couple of photographs. They don’t turn out nearly as well as the ones Trixie takes, but she leans over to look at the camera screen and says that they’re charming. The salamander jumps out of Trixie’s hand and scurries away to hide itself in the underbrush, and she sits down on the log next to Katya.

“You know, this is bringing some stuff back for me.” Her knees are pressed together and she has her forearms braced against her thighs so that she’s stooped over. It’s cold when they stop moving, and her hands are sort of shaking. “I used to hook up in the woods a lot in high school.”

“The salamander reminded you of your exes?”

Trixie lifts both eyebrows. “God, I wish. They were way slimier.”

She giggles, and Katya opens her mouth wide and laughs right along with her. She doesn’t talk like this very often, doesn’t like to reminisce about her life in Wisconsin. Katya closes her mouth and gives Trixie space to share.

She’s not looking at Katya but her cheeks are pink and she’s pretty sure it isn’t just from the weather. “It wasn’t ideal, but- it was the only place I could go and not have to worry about being seen holding hands with a girl.”

“You think holding hands counts as hooking up?” Katya asks, careful to keep her voice level, not to let teasing pour out into it.

Trixie lifts her head and squawks. “Bitch! You know I’m waiting until marriage to hold hands for the first time. Hand holding is a sacred act between me, my wife, and God.”

“Hand holding is really fucking gay,” Katya says, and it makes Trixie laugh so hard she almost topples right off the log and onto the ground. “You lose your virginity in the forest, you triflin’ backwoods ho?”

She says it half because she wants to know the answer and half because it makes Trixie’s whole face go pink with shyness right up to the tips of her ears. Often, when Katya pushes her like this she squirms free of the conversation and busies herself doing literally anything else, but there’s nowhere for her to go right now. And anyway, she started it.

“Sort of. I lost it in the back of a 1964 Chevy C10. But it was parked in the woods.”

For just a moment, Katya imagines a much younger Trixie spread out in the truck bed on top of her Little Mermaid comforter from home. Trixie, fumbling and embarrassed and teenaged, touching and being touched for the first time. It makes her face feel hot and she looks at the Trixie here with her instead, the Trixie who has her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. Her Trixie.

“That’s so gay,” Katya says, but her voice cracks. “And so off-brand for you.”

“I _know_!” Trixie gets up from her perch next to Katya on the log. She seems kind of agitated, and she holds the camera up so she can look through the viewfinder rather than directly at Katya. “I’m not trying to get sticks and leaves in my hair anymore. That’s so not it. Turn your head to the left a tiny bit.”

Katya does as she’s told and stays as still as she can. The wet from the log is seeping through her pants and making her thighs feel clammy and cadaverish. Trixie makes a small, frustrated noise and comes back over to Katya. She brushes her fingers through Katya’s hair to fluff it out and rescues the couple of strands that have gotten stuck to her face. Trixie’s warm thumb lingers against Katya’s cheek for a little longer than necessary, and she finds herself leaning in to that small touch. It makes Katya feel way off balance, to have Trixie looming over her. She finds herself staring up at Trixie with her lips parted, awed and sort of woozy with the thrill of getting to just look at her.

“There,” Trixie says quietly. “Now you’re perfect.”

She clears her throat and steps away again to get the photographs they need, occasionally calling out to Katya to have her make a tiny adjustment. It’s usually a struggle for them to be serious whenever they do this, and they end up with several shots of Katya’s wide grin and hardly any of her looking suitably solemn and inquisitive. Today, Trixie is quieter than usual, and it helps Katya to stay focused.

“Maybe we should try calling for him?” Katya offers, once Trixie puts the camera away in her backpack.

It makes her roll her eyes but she comes back over to stand in front of Katya with her hands on her hips and their knees almost touching. “What kind of noises do they make?”

Katya spent most of yesterday morning, while she was packing for their trip, listening to various experts on the internet explaining what a bigfoot call sounds like. She’d practiced enough that it’d made her throat hurt and she’d had to stop, but she thinks she’s gotten it down.

“Like, um. . . howls? Grunts, screams, growls. Every kind of spooky noise.”

“Oh sure,” Trixie says sagely. “So like you when you’re sleeping?”

Katya lets her have that one, because it’s not like it isn’t true. Instead of defending herself, she cups her hands around her mouth and lifts her chin to amplify the noise. It’s a strange bellowing reminiscent of an ape, and it makes Trixie’s eyes go very wide. She takes a couple of clumsy steps back away from Katya and stares open-mouthed until she’s done.

“Are you haunted? Are you fucking _possessed_?”

Katya is the first to crack, and she laughs so hard that no sound comes out. Trixie makes up for it, like always, squawking so loud that Katya imagines all of the birds in the forest taking flight at once in a cacophony of flapping. She gets up from her perch on the damp log and rushes Trixie, grabbing her balled fists out of the air to shake them around in her grip. This is why they do this; this is why she doesn’t ever want to do this without Trixie.

When they settle down they both seem to realise at the same time that Katya is still holding Trixie’s hands. She takes them back and folds her arms over her stomach, instead.

“I don’t think I’m sure that calling him to us is a good idea,” Katya says. “What if he comes to slurp our brains out of our ear holes?”

Trixie lifts both eyebrows. “First of all, you gotta stop gendering it. You don’t know Bigfoot like that. And it ain’t slurping anybody’s brains, Katya. Bigfoot is _gentle_.”

She’s so adamant that she actually stomps her foot. It makes Katya giggle and Trixie huffs at her, but she’s smiling too. She takes out the FLIR camera so that they can get some thermal images. Katya likes how focused she looks, how her nose crinkles when she peers down at the viewfinder and sweeps the camera in slow arcs around them.

“Anything?” Katya asks. She’s wandered away from Trixie a little ways because she thought she heard a noise, which turned out to be a squirrel hanging out in the canopy right over their heads. When she turns over her shoulder to look, Trixie is pointing the camera at her.

“Nothing out here is hot,” she says very seriously. “Except you.”

It makes Katya whine in the back of her throat and fan herself with one hand, circling her hips lazily. She thinks it’s so funny to moan like this, especially in front of Trixie who always goes pink in the cheeks and drops her jaw like she’s startled. She rolls her eyes and turns her back on Katya to investigate the undergrowth some more. The ground beneath them has gotten rockier and the moss is making everything slippery. Every few steps Katya feels like she’s about to lose her footing and she can’t help but let out a little yell each time.

Trixie is further up the trail now, because Katya keeps allowing herself to get distracted. The path has dipped down closer to the creek and she can feel the spray of the water against the high points of her face, cold enough that it makes her scrunch her nose and shudder. There’s no way Trixie will hear if she calls out to her, so she unhooks the radio from her waistband and holds down the button.

“Trixie, it’s me.”

Even from behind, even from several feet away, she can read Trixie’s irritation. “Yes, I know. You don’t have to say that every fucking time. What is it?”

“Your butt looks good, girl.”

Trixie turns around and Katya grins widely and gives her a little wave. She’s too far to know for sure, and it’s so cold, but she thinks Trixie might be blushing. The drop in barometric pressure is giving Katya a headache and she knows they have maybe an hour before it starts really storming.

“Trixie it’s me,” she says into the radio again, and gets a terse _Katya_ back. “Also, look for damage to the branches that’s higher than just people walking.”

It’s fun to see Trixie’s arm bend to lift the radio to her mouth, and hear the little crackle of static before her voice comes through. Trixie is her favourite person to talk to, always, even when she sounds frustrated and ornery. “Oh sure. Because he’s nearly eight feet tall, right?”

“Mm. So not that much taller than you.”

Trixie stomps off ahead, her braids bouncing against her back. She’s not really mad, Katya doesn’t think. There just always comes a point, every time they do this, when Trixie gets annoyed and loses hope that they’re going to find any evidence. Sometimes Katya will ply her with snacks or tug on the end of her ponytail until she earns a smile, but it’s so rainy and cold and awful today that she doesn’t think that would work.

Her boots are rubbing even through her thick hiking socks and she’s distracted by the raw spot on the round bone of her ankle, wishes her shoes weren’t laced so tight so she could work her fingers inside. The bathroom in the motel is not luxurious, nowhere near as nice as Trixie’s bathroom with its yellow floral shower curtain and all the plants she has lined up along the windowsill, but Katya still finds herself daydreaming about getting back there and taking a hot shower. Maybe tonight, if she’s lucky and if the patchy motel wifi holds out, she’ll get to squeeze in next to Trixie in one of the twin beds and watch a movie with her.

Katya has been looking at the ground mostly, because she doesn’t want to trip over something and fall on her ass. Just off the trail, a footprint catches her eye. It’s way bigger than Trixie’s are, so big she doesn’t even register it as a footprint at all until she notices five distinct, round toes.

“Trixie, you’re not gonna believe this,” she calls out.

Trixie turns to look at her in an unnatural way like an owl, moving her head right around without the rest of her body moving at all. She has her hands on her hips and little droplets are falling from the ends of her braids and making a dark patch on the back of her jacket. “What now?”

“A print. I think.”

The ground is slippery and Trixie eyes the incline she’s just struggled up and then shakes her head at Katya. “Take a picture. I’m not about to break my neck.”

She’s the one with the camera around her neck. Katya struggles for a while with her phone, experimenting with the flash on or off to try and get it to actually show up. She finds it’s better if she crouches. She starts to lose her balance and, unthinking, puts her hand out to catch herself and has to wipe the mud off on the thigh of her pants. From this close the shape of it is clearer and Katya can splay her hand next to it. It’s easily over ten inches long; she’d guess closer to fifteen.

“That’s a big foot,” Katya says quietly. She braces for Trixie to make fun of her for her sincerity, but she must be too far away to hear.

There’s only one footprint, but the rain is getting heavier and heavier and it’s not unfeasible that the rest of them might have gotten washed away. Katya takes a few more pictures and then has to put her phone away because the screen is so covered with beads of rainwater that it’s stopped responding to her touch.

When she straightens up again and looks around, Trixie is gone. She shields her eyes from the weather with one hand and looks for a flash of pink or blonde in amongst all of the greenery, but there’s nothing. The woods are silent again.

“Trixie?” she calls out.

There’s a line of smudged footprints in the mud — Trixie-sized ones, this time — but they disappear beneath the layer of detritus littering the forest floor. Katya says Trixie’s name into the radio but gets nothing back this time, not even static. She starts in the direction she thinks Trixie must have gone and calls for her over and over, worrying the waterproof case around the radio with her thumbnail as she goes. It won’t help anyone if she starts panicking now, she knows that, but Trixie has the map and all of the common sense.

Katya keeps her head ducked so the rain doesn’t get in her eyes and she moves as quickly as she can without slipping over, her breath coming in short little puffs. She keeps calling Trixie’s name as loud as she can, but the creek is so swollen and noisy that it feels hopeless.

“Trixie!” she yells again, and this time she hears someone very faintly calling back to her.

It feels juvenile, like playing Marco Polo as a child, which she was forbidden from doing because she would get too swept up in the theatre of it all and make herself hysterical. She keeps calling Trixie’s name over and over, but she’s careful to pause now and listen out for Trixie calling her own name back to her.

“Over here!” Katya hears finally, loudly. She stops where she is and rotates a full three-sixty degrees, but she still doesn’t actually see Trixie. “I’m down here!”

“Where?” Relief is making Katya want to cry, she’s so glad to be hearing Trixie’s voice right now. She scrubs both hands over her face and lets out a quick, tight breath into the cup of her palms. “Trixie?”

“I fell down a hole.”

Now that she knows what she’s looking for, Katya right away spots the top of Trixie’s head, poking out of the ground like a Beckett play. She drops to her knees and peers down at Trixie in the hole.

“Are you okay?”

“ _Katya_.”

Trixie stretches an arm up over her head and Katya takes her hand and squeezes tight. Her knuckles are red with the cold and her fingers are trembling in Katya’s grip.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah. I landed on soft dirt.” Trixie makes a strange noise, like a little snort. “Kind of.”

It’s not graceful, getting her out of the hole. Katya’s strong, and she holds both of Trixie’s hands in hers and does her best to drag her up while she braces her feet against the sides of the pit, but the ground has been made slippery with rainwater and it’s collapsing beneath her. Her foot slips and she screams and clutches tighter at Katya’s hands.

“You’re okay,” Katya tells them both. “I promise. I’m not gonna let go of you, Trix. It’s okay.”

“Please,” Trixie says, her eyes enormous. “Katya. Please.”

When they finally get her onto solid ground, Katya throws her arms around Trixie’s neck and hides her face in Trixie’s hair, made roofless with joy. Trixie is crying, she’s pretty sure, so she stays right where she is with Trixie’s arms around her waist and gives her a minute to calm down.

“You’re okay,” Katya says when they separate, and she cradles Trixie’s face in her palms. She’s not sure which of them she’s trying to convince. The tip of Trixie’s nose is pink and twitching and her lashes are all sticking together. “Come on, mama. Let’s get you up.”

They’re both soaked, both freezing and mud-splattered. Katya helps Trixie to her feet and lets her support herself against Katya’s bent elbow until she gets her feet steady beneath her. Her duck boots are caked with dirt, little twigs and leaves sticking to them as well, and Trixie huffs an annoyed breath when she looks down at them.

“Do you think that’s some kind of-”

“Please,” Trixie cuts her off, and pinches the bridge of her nose. “It’s not a bigfoot nest or whatever the fuck you’re going to say. Just don’t.”

Katya tilts her head and nudges Trixie with her elbow. “Do I detect a hint of negativity?”

It doesn’t make her laugh, doesn’t make her smile even the tiniest bit. The sky feels very low to the ground and it’s starting to get dark already, especially with all of the shade from the trees. It’s going to storm soon; all of the hairs on Katya’s arms are standing on end. She feels vulnerable out here, like she wants to hunker down close to the earth.

“This is no way to live,” Trixie says. She looks exhausted and she’s still trembling. “Can we just get out of here?”

“We sure can,” Katya says easily.

They pick their way back down the incline towards the road. Katya doesn’t have the most robust sense of direction at the best of times, and she’s surprised when they emerge from the woods. She thought they were in much deeper, but she figures they’ve just been wandering circuitously for most of the day. Trixie has gone radio silent — literally, hers broke when she landed on it — and Katya knows better than to probe her for a conversation right now.

At the car, Trixie accepts the towel Katya hands her from the trunk and does a perfunctory job of cleaning herself off with it. When she’s done she folds it up and puts it on the passenger seat so she doesn’t make Katya’s car dirty, and then she gets in very gingerly. Her shoulders are up around her ears and there’s a little knot of discomfort between her brows.

Before she can swing her legs around into the car, Katya comes to stand in front of her. She touches two fingers to the underside of Trixie’s chin and nudges her until she lifts her head. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

“I think I busted my ankle. But I’m from Wisconsin, so that’s kind of written in my genetic code to happen at some point.”

“Trixie,” Katya says very gently. It makes her close her eyes and she sniffles a couple times. Her skin feels very cold beneath Katya’s fingers, and she has a mud splatter on her forehead that Katya swipes away with the thumb of her free hand. “I have Advil if you want.”

She shakes her head and brings her legs around and into the car, dislodging Katya everywhere they’re touching. “No, I’m fine. Can we just go back now.”

It makes something in Katya’s chest feel uncomfortably hard and small and sharp-edged, to see her like this. Trixie has her head tipped back against the seat and she’s breathing shallowly like she’s afraid to jostle herself. She actually whimpers when Katya turns the key in the ignition and the engine starts, and she’s silent for the entire drive back to the motel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come and chat on [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie) or [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/), if you'd like! I'd love to hear what you thought ♡


	3. darkness falls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks as always to the polycule: I love you all and am grateful every day for your love, guidance and support.
> 
> Every day, I learn more and more about courage and kindness from [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter). To know her is to love her, and I am so fortunate to count her among the most dear and cherished people in my life. Thank you for being you, and thank you for letting me love you.

The rain has begun to fall in earnest by the time they get back to the motel. Katya wants to run, shrieking and spraying water from her heels, across the parking lot. Instead she offers Trixie her elbow to help her cross the short distance to their room. She refuses and hobbles stubbornly alone, Katya trailing a couple steps behind so she can catch her if she slips or her ankle gives out. Trixie lowers herself carefully into one of the Adirondack chairs outside their door and leans down to begin untying her boots.

Katya drops to her knees at Trixie’s feet, her hair heavy with rainwater and falling into her eyes. She pushes her bangs back with the heels of both palms. They must be sticking up all funky but Trixie doesn’t laugh at her.

“C’mere. Let me help you.”

Trixie must be utterly miserable right now because she just lets her do it. Katya starts with her good foot and frees it from the hiking boot. There’s something strange and intimate about having Trixie’s sock-foot in her hands, and Katya honks her big toe a couple times. When she turns her attention to Trixie’s injured side she’s much more careful, loosening the laces as far as she can before she even starts trying to ease the boot off. Trixie is breathing very slowly through her mouth and her face is pinched.

“Ow,” she says very quietly when Katya has to manoeuvre her foot, and a tear escapes her closed eye and slides down her cheek.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Katya tells her as she finally gets the boot off and discards it, cradling Trixie’s foot in both hands.

She has to bite the inside of her cheek when she peels off Trixie’s sock and pushes up the leg of her pants enough to get a look at her ankle. It must show on her face anyway, because Trixie lifts her head from where it’s resting against the back of the seat to look at her.

“Is it really bad?”

Katya clears her throat. “It’s- no- I-”

“Katya.” Trixie’s so pale, all of that lovely pink gone from her cheeks and nose.

“It’s kinda. . .it’s purple.”

Trixie jerks upright as much as she can and leans down to look at her own leg. Katya is still holding her foot and she feels strangely protective over it, like she wants to curl her body around Trixie. She doesn’t allow herself that small pleasure. Instead, she manages what she hopes is a reassuring smile.

“Do you think it’s broken?” Trixie whispers.

When she first started at her job, Katya had needed to do a first aid course in case somebody topples out of their _pincha mayurasana_ and breaks something. She has Trixie run through a couple of tests, makes her wiggle her toes and circle her foot and try to push against Katya’s hand.

“I don’t think so, honey, but we should get you x-rayed when we get home. Just to be safe.”

Sweat has begun to bead along Trixie’s hairline from the pain of Katya’s probing, even as careful and gentle as she was. Her face is still streaked with mud, her hair wet. Katya has the room key in her backpack and she lets them inside, gestures for Trixie to take the first shot in the bathroom.

She undresses and passes her clothes around the door to Katya, who puts them in the collapsible mesh laundry bag Trixie has brought with her. While she’s at it, Katya strips out of her own clothes and adds them to the bag with Trixie’s. She’s aching for a cigarette, but the rain is lashing against the window so hard that it’s rattling in its frame, so instead she sits on the end of the bed in her underwear and fidgets with the lid of her carton of Camels.

She should be going through all the photographs they took today and checking for evidence they missed, or drafting posts for her social media, or maybe even planning their next excursion. It’s hard to focus, knowing Trixie is hurting on the other side of the wall. Katya finds herself sitting very still and listening for any sound coming from the bathroom, any clue that Trixie has maybe fallen or collapsed entirely. She knows it’s bad; it’s silent aside from the noise of the shower. Trixie isn’t singing. Eventually she hears the water shut off, and Trixie emerges from the bathroom in a great cloud of steam that immediately perfumes the whole room. She’s wrapped in a towel and her hair is wet and dark and sticking to her neck.

Katya lets herself look at the pretty flush all across Trixie’s collarbones and chest for exactly one second, and then she turns her head. She very badly wants to get up and help Trixie cross the room, but there’s no way she’d ever be allowed. The best she can do is not make Trixie suffer the indignity of Katya watching her hobble over and sit down on her own bed.

“I think I need that Advil now,” Trixie says. Her voice sounds thin and tight, and when Katya glances over at her she’s covering her eyes with one hand.

It’s good to have something to do, a way to be useful. Katya has a little first aid kit in her backpack and she passes it to Trixie. She refills Trixie’s bottle with fresh water and gives that to her as well, then sits herself down next to Trixie on the bed. Katya is still only in her underwear; she’s comfortable enough around Trixie that it’s fine. She hasn’t ever seen Trixie undressed, but that’s okay. Trixie is just more reserved.

Trixie swallows a couple pills and then flops backward. It makes her towel ride up her thighs. They’re so smooth and tan and lovely that Katya is immediately jealous and has to look away. She likes how soft Trixie is, and how she lets Katya snuggle up to her on the couch or in one of their beds. Sometimes when they’re hanging out in a group, Trixie will swat one of their friends away from touching her and then come over and rest her cheek against Katya’s shoulder.

“Are we going back out, or can I put on pajamas?” Trixie still has her eyes closed, and one arm thrown over her face now too.

“I thought we could go get dinner at the place down the street. But I sure don’t mind if you come to dinner in your nightgown.”

Trixie scoffs and props herself up on both elbows. “Shut up, I didn’t bring a _nightgown_. It has way too many frills and ruffles to fit in my suitcase.”

Katya is so relieved to hear Trixie make a joke that she can’t even manage a response. She just stares at her, until Trixie flushes and says _what. stop._ and sits all the way upright again.

“Are you completely sure that you’re okay?”

“I’m _fine_. Stop fussing, it freaks me out. You know I haven’t ever experienced tenderness and care before.”

Katya leaves Trixie to get herself dressed and she hurries through her own shower. Towards the end the hot starts to run out and Katya hops from foot to foot, her entire body erupting in violent gooseflesh. She slips on the tile and flails to catch herself, sending all of their toiletries raining down noisily. Katya calls out to tell Trixie that she’s okay, before she does something stupid like try to get up and check on her.

She changes in the bathroom, and when she comes out Trixie is fully clothed and sitting on the end of her bed with the sleeves of her sweater pulled down over her hands. She’s letting her hair air dry and it’s falling in loose curls across her shoulders and back. She looks fresh and clean and lovely, even with her swollen ankle. It seems like she can’t get her shoe on over it because she’s only wearing one pristine white sneaker. When Katya lifts her gaze from Trixie’s sock foot to her face she pouts and tilts her head.

“I am _not_ about to carry you someplace,” Katya says.

It makes Trixie laugh and she gets up, takes a couple of tentative, cervine steps across the room. “I can manage. It’s fine, see? I’m very brave.”

“I- yes. I know you are.” It still doesn’t seem like a good idea to push it, and Katya is glad when Trixie sits down again with a little huff, to wait for Katya to lace up her own shoes.

Katya drives them to the restaurant, even though it’s right down the street. The storm has picked up a lot and Trixie is in no fit state to walk even a short distance. Katya has to bring the Wrangler right around as close as she can to the door of their room for Trixie to get in, and she still winces with every step. It’s so loud in the car with the rain thundering onto the roof and the windshield wipers on full speed that they can’t really talk at all.

Before they’re even out of the car, Trixie starts muttering under her breath about something Katya only catches snippets of. “What’s wrong now?”

“Bigfoot Steakhouse, Katya? Really?”

Katya laughs and unbuckles her seatbelt. She pauses with her hand on the door handle, watching the rain come down in sheets and hit the tarmac with such force that it looks fuzzy, like static. “I know it’s not like, fine dining. I just thought it’d be a cool experience. We might get some good shots for my Instagram story.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Trixie says flatly.

“Oh! No, I know that.” A flash of something uncomfortably hot goes through Katya. It’s the first thing she makes sure of whenever they eat someplace new. “I checked online. They have tons of veggie options.”

She still doesn’t seem thrilled, but she lets Katya offer her elbow and help her up the ramp and through the restaurant door. It’s quiet inside for a Saturday night, and several heads turn towards them when a gust slams the door closed. They get seated in a booth with cracked red vinyl benches, and Katya’s pants catch on something sticky when she tries to slide across but she keeps her mouth shut. This was her pick.

Trixie needs to keep her ankle elevated to help the swelling go down, so she stretches her leg across the space beneath the table and props her foot in Katya’s lap, on top of her folded-up jacket. Katya smiles as politely as she can at their hostess and asks if they couldn’t possibly have some ice, and she comes back right away with a cold compress for Katya to hold against Trixie’s ankle.

This place has a Bigfoot burger that — the menu boasts — weighs in at one pound. Katya briefly considers ordering it just to say that she did, but the thought of all that digesting makes her stomach roll over. Instead she gets chicken strips, and Trixie shrieks a laugh and asks her if she wants some crayons and a wordsearch too.

They’re both distracted while they wait for their food to arrive. Trixie is editing some of the photographs from today with an app on her phone so Katya can post them to her social media later. Katya replies to some tweets and Instagram messages, but when they’re served they both put their phones face down at the end of the table, like they do every time they eat together.

“I’m so sorry you got hurt,” Katya blurts after a swollen, uncomfortable silence.

Trixie has been cutting her sandwich up into neat, manageable pieces but not actually eating any of them. Her foot twitches in Katya's lap, and she lifts her head to look at her. “It’s not your fault I fell down a hole.”

“No, but. . .I know you don’t really want to be here. I know it’s not super important to you. To see a bigfoot.”

“When have you ever known me to do something I didn’t want to do?” Trixie puts a piece of her sandwich into her mouth and stares Katya down while she chews it, so that she’s left with no choice but to either answer the question or squirm around in the silence.

“No, I know that. I just- you. . .I don’t want you to be miserable.”

Trixie honks out a laugh that’s loud enough to make the cluster of wizened, walnut-coloured men at the next table over turn and stare at her. She looks a little more like herself now that the Advil has kicked in and she’s eating something, and she’s absently twisting the ends of her hair around her fingers as it dries into curls.

“I don’t want you to have too high an estimation of yourself, because you are truly awful, but-” Trixie looks down at her plate. “I don’t know how I could ever be miserable, spending time with you.”

Katya makes an exaggerated retching noise, to disguise how buoyed she is by that. “Trixie Mattel, are you my _friend_?”

“I need to be committed to a psychiatric facility,” Trixie says lightly.

Instead of responding further, Katya takes another french fry from their shared basket and eats it very quickly in small bites like a squirrel. She’s having to hold on to the heel of Trixie’s foot because the bench seats are just far enough apart that it keeps almost slipping out of her lap. It means she only has one hand free to eat with, and that makes her even more slow than she usually is, but Trixie doesn’t once nag her to hurry up.

* * *

When they get back to the motel there’s a sticky note on their door letting them know the power is out from the storm, and to come collect flashlights and extra blankets from the front desk if they’d like. Katya helps Trixie inside and leaves her to change into pajamas while she goes to get everything. The teenager manning the desk is apologetic to a degree that makes Katya think he’s already been yelled at once or twice this evening, so she tips him and promises she won’t leave a bad Yelp review.

She comes back to Trixie with her arms full of blankets and a flashlight in the back pocket of her pants. It’s heavy enough that it’s making a gap and her bare skin is exposed to the cold. Trixie is in bed already, the sheets pulled up to her chin and a scrim of not-quite-removed makeup around her eyes.

“You want another blanket?” Katya asks, and starts unfolding it before Trixie even says yes. She drapes it over Trixie as neatly as she can. In the darkness, she smacks her hip against the edge of the nightstand between their two beds and a small yelp escapes her. Trixie laughs, and only laughs harder when Katya whines at her.

Once Katya is satisfied that Trixie is properly tucked in, she crouches down next to her. Her eyes have started to adjust and Trixie’s, when they open, are shiny. She gets weepy when she’s uncomfortable, and her face is smooth in a way that looks measured, careful.

“Do you need anything else?”

“Mm-mm.” Trixie shakes her head, and then hides her face against her pillow.

Katya stays right there on the floor for a moment, both hands in fists against her thighs so she doesn’t reach out and brush Trixie’s hair back or touch her cheek. She can’t bear the thought of Trixie swatting her away, Trixie asking not to be touched. Katya takes as long as she can in the bathroom, to give Trixie time to cry into her pillow if she needs to.

It’s so cold in their room that, when she gets into bed, Katya’s still shivering even beneath the extra blanket. She lies there with her eyes open for a long time, waiting to get warm. She knows Trixie’s still awake because she can see her fidgeting, and every so often she makes these very quiet disgruntled noises.

After what feels like four hundred hours, Katya can’t stand it anymore. “Trix, you need to keep warm. You’re still in shock. Probably. I’m a doctor.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I got an idea.” Katya gets out of her bed, as much as it pains her to come out from beneath the sheets. She pads across the room with her blanket wrapped around herself, and climbs in with Trixie instead.

Trixie shrills a high-pitched noise of distress when Katya makes a gap in her sheets and the cold air comes in, and she scoots backward until she’s almost pressed against the wall. “I don’t wanna wrestle, Katya.”

“I’m gonna keep you warm.”

It takes a lot of wriggling, some awkward maneuvering, before they’re comfortable. Trixie is curled around Katya from behind with her arm over her waist, clinging like Katya is a hot water bottle. She feels warmer almost immediately, and Trixie has finally stopped shivering. It feels so good to not be freezing anymore that Katya arches like a cat without really thinking about it, and presses herself back against Trixie’s hips. She doesn’t react, not verbally, but Katya feels the careful breath Trixie lets out against the back of her neck.

The bed smells like Trixie, the way her bed always does. Katya was so afraid today, stumbling through the forest by herself looking for Trixie. When she showered earlier she realised she has a few thin, livid lines across her cheeks and forehead from where the branches whipped her. Her shoulders are aching a bit from hauling Trixie out of that hole. More than that, she still feels faintly sick with panic, like taking a shuddering breath hours after coming down from a crying jag. Katya tries to roll over and look at Trixie’s face. Or maybe hide her own face against the warm, soft skin of Trixie’s neck. Trixie won’t let her do it, tightens her grip so Katya has to relax back against the mattress again.

The storm has finally passed, and through the gap in the curtains Katya can see the phosphorous moon sitting low in the sky. She feels foolish tonight, drunk on proximity and soft touches. Trixie’s hand is at Katya’s stomach to keep their bodies pressed together, and Katya threads her fingers through Trixie’s and squeezes. The darkness makes her feel adolescent, like she wants to talk and talk in that mindless, exhausted way.

“Thanks for being here with me, Trixie.”

“Go to sleep, Katya,” she says, but her thumb makes a small circle across the back of Katya’s hand.

She doesn’t, not really, and she’s pretty sure Trixie doesn’t either. Katya rests fitfully, not used to being held. Trixie’s breaths are tickling her ear. Every so often she’ll shift in the bed and make a small, pained noise. The thunder rolls down from the mountains and cracks inside Katya’s chest, and she clings tightly to Trixie’s hand.

When the sky finally starts to turn milky and grey in the predawn, Katya extracts herself from beneath Trixie’s arm and gets carefully out of bed. Trixie isn’t all the way asleep, and she makes a cute little grunting noise and starfishes her hand against the warm spot on the sheets where Katya just was. She tucks them around her so there aren’t any gaps and hovers over her for a moment, arrested by the peculiar urge to kiss Trixie’s forehead. Katya swallows back her rough morning mouth, and gets into her coat and boots as quietly as she can.

She could sit out on one of the chairs to smoke but she feels agitated and foggy with exhaustion, and walking sounds nice. It’s so quiet now that the storm has passed. There are a couple people opening up their businesses for the day, but only one car passes her along the main street through town. She burns through her first cigarette quickly and takes her time with the second. Everything seems more vibrant and lush this morning after all that rainfall and, once she finishes her cigarette, the air smells clean and earthy.

Katya gets coffee for herself, and a tea and a pastry for Trixie, from the little independent place off the main street. The older woman behind the counter chats with her about the storm and how the power didn’t come back on until four am, and she’d worried she wouldn’t be able to open the cafe today. Katya is usually good at this, at taking a genuine interest in other people, but she’s fidgety with how bad she wants to get back and check on Trixie and she’s hardly listening.

Katya’s hands are full and she stares quizzically at the door to their room. She knocks with her elbow and then realises that Trixie is in no fit state to come open the door and puts her coffee down on the ground so she can get inside. When she does, Trixie is fully dressed — including one shoe and her coat — and sitting on the end of her bed, with her suitcase packed and zippered and upright next to her.

“Oh!” Katya hands Trixie her breakfast, and shrugs out of her own coat. “I was gonna go up the mountain again this morning and see if there’s anything we missed on our first sweep. Lady at the coffee place said there’s sometimes an uptick in sightings after a big storm.”

“I don’t wanna do that.” Trixie opens the brown bag to look inside, but doesn’t pull out the pastry Katya got for her.

“Well, you _can’t_ , honey,” Katya laughs. “I figured you could hang out here and stay warm and comfy? I won’t take a super long time.” She drinks the last of her coffee and heads for the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. With the door left open, she can see Trixie’s reflection in the mirror over the sink.

“No, Katya. I want to go home. I miss Orville. And I need to go to urgent care.”

Katya spits her mouthful of toothpaste into the sink and lifts her head to meet Trixie’s eyes in the mirror. She didn’t do a great job of tying her hair back and half of it is falling down from the scrunchie and into her face. “I’m gonna take you straight there when we get back to the city.”

“You’re really just gonna leave me here by myself, immobile, while you make sure you didn’t accidentally miss your chance to get a selfie with fucking Bigfoot? Wow.”

There’s a pinched quality to Trixie’s voice this morning, and she’s sitting very still on the end of the bed like she’s afraid to move. Katya suspects her ankle is made worse and more stiff by lying down all night. She’s like this in the mornings, cantankerous and eager to get into a spat with Katya, but today she just looks so tired and so sad.

“Trix-”

“Just _stop it_.” Trixie pinches the bridge of her nose. “I can’t- I don’t wanna do this with you anymore.”

Katya whips around to face Trixie properly, but she doesn’t come out of the bathroom. She’s afraid to step over that threshold, afraid of what might happen if she gets any closer. “What does _that_ mean? What do you mean?”

“Nothing, it’s-” Trixie drops her hands to sit limp in her lap, and her shoulders sag as well. “I’m tired. My ankle hurts. I just want to go home.”

There’s an unpleasant sharpness in Katya’s mouth from brushing too quickly, and she works her tongue around her teeth. She can’t really stall any longer, so she packs up her dopp kit and tosses it in the general direction of her weekender bag, comes to kneel at Trixie’s feet.

“I’m sorry,” she says very gently. “I never wanted for you to get hurt.”

“It’s not your fault.”

It’s not comfortable on the floor, and Trixie won’t look at her. Katya tries to duck into her field of vision but Trixie’s hair is in the way, and she’s pretty sure her eyes are closed as well. Katya’s coffee sloshes around in her empty stomach when she shifts, and she starts absently chewing on the inside of her cheek.

“It kind of is. I’m the one who dragged you here. I know you don’t really want to be here.”

Trixie lifts her head finally and looks at Katya properly. “Do _you_ not want me to be here?”

The thought of that is so absurd that Katya almost laughs, but from the look on Trixie’s face she knows that would be a bad idea. “Huh?” she blurts instead.

“You keep saying that. It kinda feels like it doesn’t really matter to you if I’m here or not.”

“Of course it matters!” Katya doesn’t mean to raise her voice, and she immediately makes sure to dial it back. A lot. “You’re my best friend. I want you to be here. I just don’t want you to be here, and hating me for it.”

“I’m not. I don’t. It’s just. . .don’t you feel like we’re wasting our time? We’ve never found anything concrete. This whole thing is. . .” Trixie trails off, and gestures in the air with one hand.

The height discrepancy between them is making Katya feel unmoored, and she gets up from the floor. She almost starts pacing but that seems worse somehow, so she drops down heavily to sit on her own bed — the bed she didn’t even sleep in — and face Trixie.

“What? Tell me what it is.”

When Trixie shouts, Katya can distract her by goofing around or showering her with compliments until she cracks. She doesn’t know what to do with this quiet, serious person.

“It’s kind of dumb. I know it matters to you, and that’s cool. But I think you’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Oh.”

Trixie’s face goes slack. “I didn’t mean-”

“No. That’s good to know.” There’s an awful catch in her throat and Katya gulps a breath and tries to let it just sit, just like that, for a moment. Her fingers twitch against her thighs with the strange urge to press down on the hurt, like worrying at a bruise, confronting the pain over and over again. “I’m dumb and embarrassing. That’s good.”

“ _You’re_ not dumb. This whole thing is just, like, pointless.” Trixie gets up, letting out a tiny noise like a wounded animal when she has to put her weight on her bad side for a second. Katya doesn’t get up to help or reach out at all. She watches Trixie hobble slowly across the space between them until she’s standing right in front of her. “It’s stupid, Katya. It’s a waste of time.”

Trixie sways like she’s going to fall down and Katya grabs for her without thinking, steadies her with her hands either side of her waist. She helps her to sit down on the mattress next to her, not quite close enough that their knees are touching. Katya’s heart feels drawn in tight and closed like a fist. She aches to go back to fifteen minutes ago, standing outside their door holding Trixie’s breakfast and thrumming with the anticipation of giving it to her.

“Why are you here then, Trixie?” Her voice comes out very quiet. “If you think it’s so stupid.”

“Because I like spending time with you!” Trixie’s outburst startles them both. Katya presses her hands together and traps them between her knees. Trixie’s throat works when she swallows and then she says, much more quietly, “Because I will do anything to get to spend a weekend with you.”

Katya frowns, and shakes her head slowly. Her brain feels like molasses, slow-moving and unpleasantly sweet. “We’re friends. I’ll spend a weekend with you, you just gotta ask.”

“No, not- I like _this_. I like sharing something with you that’s just ours.”

They’ve been at parties before where Katya has caught Trixie’s eye across the room and known, immediately, that she needed to figure out a way to get them both out of there. Sometimes when everybody is hanging out on someone’s living room floor, they’ll be scolded by the rest of their friends for talking quietly with their heads bent together and not participating in the group conversation.

Katya’s face feels hot and her eyelashes are sticking together, but she isn’t crying. She isn’t. “You do?” she says. “Because you just said it’s an embarrassing waste of time.”

“I didn’t mean that. That was cruel, and I’m sorry.” Trixie covers her eyes with a hand, like she can’t bear to look at Katya anymore. “I just- I. . . like you. A lot.”

Katya huffs a breath through her nose. “Yeah, Trixie. We’re friends. That’s how that works.”

“Oh my god. No.” Trixie sounds exasperated, and her face is pink with the indignation of not being understood. That feels unfair. She's the one who’s talking in circles. “I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do. I’m- you’re so-”

Katya reaches for Trixie’s free hand and squeezes her fingers. When she loosens her grip a tiny bit, Trixie turns her hand over in Katya’s so she can slot their fingers together, instead. She’s stopped hiding her face, and when Katya meets her eyes she doesn’t look away this time.

“Can you just tell me?” Her voice comes out very careful and soft. It’s how she often talks to Orville, and Trixie teases her for it and then turns right around and babies him herself. “Tell me what’s wrong and we’ll fix it. Just say it. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

“I want to kiss you,” Trixie blurts. Katya feels her jaw drop like it’s happening to somebody else. “I wanna kiss you all the fucking time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm around on [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie) and [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) if you vibe with either of those! I'd love to hear what you thought ♡


	4. all things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks as always to the polycule, for not letting me be unkind to myself and for loving me no matter how much i complain. i am so blessed to have you and i cherish you all so much. 
> 
> it's a really special thing, to have somebody who believes in you so fiercely that you can almost start to believe in yourself. [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter) is so kind and so smart, and i feel extraordinarily lucky to know her and to love her. thank you for everything, i truly couldn't do it without you.

“You want to kiss me?” Katya says slowly.

She knows that if she turned around the mountains would still be there and the window would still be splattered with raindrops, that if she went outside again she’d hear the cacophony of the forest and the roar of the swollen creak. It all just seems suddenly very far away, like her whole world has banked violently to one side, and she has to plant her free hand against the mattress so she doesn’t tumble right into Trixie.

They’ve had a lot of mornings together. Katya knows that it can take Trixie a little while to warm up to the day, that nothing she says before she’s eaten breakfast can be taken to heart. But when she lifts her eyes to meet Trixie’s her heart does a strange little flip that feels almost like hiccups, or like drinking a soda too fast. Trixie looks very calm and very certain. Her eyes are wet, but she lifts her chin in defiance.

“Yes. Yeah. I do. I have for. . . a really long time.”

“You- you _like_ me?”

“I hate you,” Trixie says immediately. It’s an impulse they both have, and it makes Katya huff a little laugh, but Trixie isn’t done. “But- I like you so much. And I’m- you know, it’s _fine_. You don’t date, and that’s cool. I like getting to be here and do this with you.”

Katya chokes out a noise that’s suspended someplace between joy and disbelief. “Trixie, oh my god.”

“I know.” Trixie’s face is red and she’s squirming, but she doesn’t try to let go of Katya’s hand again, and she doesn’t look away. “Don’t. It’s so embarrassing.”

“Trixie, honey.” Katya brings her free hand up to touch Trixie’s face and it feels like sunlight, like skin still warm with the heat of the day and sand rinsing away down the drain. “I don’t date because I don’t need to. I have you.”

Trixie tilts her face towards Katya’s touch and makes this small, contented noise. Her eyes are lidded and sleepy, like she gets in the mornings when she wakes up and Katya has breakfast waiting. She’s Katya’s favourite person in the world, and she’s so beautiful, and she _wants her_.

“That’s why?”

“ _Yeah_. You’re. . . I have you,” Katya says again. She lets her thumb brush across the skin beneath Trixie’s eye, purple with exhaustion but so soft. “I just thought- well. You shut me down right when we first met.”

Trixie makes an outraged, indiscriminate noise. “Because you try to fuck _everyone_ when you first meet them.”

When they met in college Katya was experimenting a lot, figuring out what she liked. She’s always been confident in this arena, if not in any other aspect of her life. When she was at school she liked the challenge of hitting on someone, seeing what worked, discovering her body. She just was never really interested in all the relationship stuff, because she already had someone to share her life with.

“It’s not- no. You’re right, I did. But I don’t do that anymore.”

“I noticed.”

The sun is up finally but the sky is cloudy and the fog hasn’t yet burned away. It means it’s not quite light inside their room and Katya feels dreamlike again. Trixie is so close to her, and so pretty and kind.

“Uh-huh. So.” Katya pauses to collect herself. Hearing Trixie say that she wants her is like a window flung wide open. All of that lovely warm light is spilling in, but it’s taking her a moment to adjust. “In my head you fell under the category of Never Would Debase Herself Like That. And that’s cool. You’re my best friend.”

She takes her hand away from Trixie’s cheek and knots their fingers together instead. Trixie’s fingers are longer than Katya’s are, but Katya’s are warmer. They’ve held hands hundreds of times, but now it feels more like a next step than the end goal.

“I almost said yes. When we met.” Trixie wrinkles her nose. “But I liked you so much right away. I thought- I wanted to be friends more than I wanted one night with you.”

Katya can’t even imagine it now. How her life might have looked if she’d persuaded Trixie. If, instead of honking that delightful, obnoxious laugh loud enough that the whole party was suspended in silence for a moment, Trixie had said _yes_ to Katya’s mouth right against her ear and her fingertips flirting with the curve of Trixie’s waist.

“I’m so thankful that you resisted my wily charm and my pungent aroma,” Katya says.

Trixie lets her have the tiniest little breath of laughter for that, but then her face goes carefully still again. “Does it- how do you feel? About. . . me?”

“I always thought we were best friends, Trixie. I didn’t know that I was allowed to want you like that.” Trixie’s mouth opens and she makes a noise that Katya might call a squeak, if she were being unkind. “But now that I have permission? _Yes_. Duh. You’re the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Trixie smiles, and her whole face breaks open. She’s so lovely, sweet and silly and pretty. Now that she’s letting herself consider it, Katya wants her so bad that her toes curl inside her boots and her ears feel hot.

“Will you kiss me?”

Katya captures Trixie’s face in both hands and is kissing her before she can even finish her sentence. She makes a cute little _hmmf_ noise against Katya’s mouth, but her arm comes around her right away to clutch her shoulder. Trixie smells so good all the time, and her hair is falling into both their faces. Katya touches her tongue to Trixie’s bottom lip and she moans in a way that reverberates into Katya’s jaw. She opens to her, lets Katya in to the slick wet heat of her mouth. Katya kisses her like nothing comes after, like they’re not building to anything and they’ll do only this for hours and hours.

When they break apart, Katya rests her forehead against Trixie’s. She’s so happy it feels like she must be glowing warm and pink, and Trixie is smiling so wide and sifting her fingers through the ends of Katya’s hair.

“I’ve wanted to do that forever,” Trixie says quietly.

Katya takes another kiss from her and hums into it. “I’ve wanted to do that for about five minutes,” she says, and Trixie shrieks a laugh. “But I don’t ever want to stop.”

They kiss a little more. Katya’s good at this. She _likes_ it. And, already, she knows she likes it best of all with Trixie. She’s so soft and so enthusiastic, making these tiny little noises of pleasure and shifting her hips. When it gets to be a little too much, when Katya’s whole body feels strung tight and thrumming, she breaks away from Trixie and slides right off the bed to the floor.

“Come back,” Trixie says, and when Katya glances up at her she’s pouting. It makes her laugh and she rests her cheek against Trixie’s knee for a moment, her heart so full up with tenderness that she could cry.

Katya unlaces Trixie’s one white sneaker and pulls it off, then hurries through getting her own boots off. She’s made clumsy by the ache low down in her stomach, by how badly she wants Trixie. When she’s done she climbs back onto the bed and encourages Trixie to lay down flat, arranges a pillow beneath her ankle. Trixie just watches her, looking down the length of her own body. She’s so gorgeous. It doesn’t feel like any of this is really happening. It seems absurd that Trixie could possibly want her, but she does. She does.

Satisfied that Trixie is as comfortable as possible, Katya comes back to lay between Trixie’s legs. She supports her weight on one elbow and leans in to kiss Trixie again. It’s different when they’re laying down. Katya feels heavy with want, and Trixie’s body is so warm beneath hers. She wants to touch Trixie so badly, and she wants Trixie to touch her, too.

“Can I take this off you?”

Katya tugs on the bottom of Trixie’s sweater. She nods and lifts her shoulders up off the bed to help Katya peel it off. The skin of her stomach is soft and Katya settles her hand in the dip of Trixie’s waist and kisses her again. She takes her time, letting her hand alternate between drifting over Trixie’s skin and just holding her waist. Trixie can’t move around too much, immobilised by her ankle, but she draws her other leg up and lets her bent knee rest against Katya’s hip.

“Is this weird?” Katya pulls back to ask. She props herself up, supports herself with her hands either side of Trixie’s head so she can look at her face.

Trixie is smudged and blushing and she huffs a little laugh. “Yeah. Kinda.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“ _No_.”

She’s so emphatic that Katya can’t help but giggle, and she drops back down to her elbows to kiss Trixie again. For a little while, she focuses on drawing out whatever noises from Trixie she can. She knows that Trixie is impatient, because she has one hand fisted in Katya’s shirt and her leg hooked over Katya’s ass and she’s squirming, but there’s no hurry. They’ve waited ten years. Katya wants to take her time, wants to be as gentle and calm and kind with Trixie as she feels.

Kissing Trixie is lovely, but when her lips start to feel tingly Katya breaks away to just look at her again, so close their noses are almost touching. Trixie isn’t wearing any makeup this morning and Katya isn’t either. She likes how Trixie’s lashes are still dark and full, how she has freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“What?” Trixie says quietly. She’s dropped her leg from around Katya again and her body is one long fidgety line beneath her.

“You’re so beautiful,” Katya tells her, and kisses the very tip of her nose. “Can you sit up?”

She does, and Katya cradles Trixie’s waist in both hands and kisses her a little more. Trixie has her own hand at Katya’s jaw and she keeps nudging her like she wants to angle her head, wants to kiss her deeper and wetter. There’s time for that later. Right now, Katya is just enjoying keeping it light and soft and touching as much of Trixie’s skin as she’ll allow.

It’s so quiet in the motel room. Outside, the town is only just waking up, and the earth feels hushed after the storm. Katya pops the clasp of Trixie’s bra and she shivers and makes a tiny noise, a little keening sound in the back of her throat. She helps to get her arms out of it and Katya tosses it across onto the other bed because she knows Trixie wouldn’t like it to be on the floor. Trixie laughs at the triumphant noise Katya makes when she lands the throw and kisses her again, but they’re both smiling too big for it to really go anywhere.

Trixie tugs on the bottom of Katya’s shirt until she gets the idea and takes it off. Underneath, she has on a red lacy bralette and she leaves it on so she can focus on Trixie. They’ve been to the beach together hundreds of times — Katya’s seen her in a swimsuit — but now she’s here naked beneath her and Katya is allowed to touch her as much as she likes. Trixie lays back against the pillows and Katya follows her down, chasing her mouth. She kisses her, supporting herself over Trixie on one bent arm. Her other hand is resting against Trixie’s stomach, just feeling the rapid lift and collapse as she huffs through her nose. When she makes a grumpy noise and bites down hard on Katya’s bottom lip, Katya finally slides her hand up to touch Trixie’s tits.

Her body is still between Trixie’s legs and she lets more of her weight rest against Trixie’s hips. Katya pinches Trixie’s nipples and her eyes flutter closed, her head thrown back against the pillows to expose the column of her throat. When Katya lowers her head and scrapes her teeth over Trixie’s tits her whole body jolts, and then she hisses through her teeth.

“Sorry, baby. I’m sorry. You okay?” Katya says. Trixie nods and takes a second to arrange her ankle comfortably again, then winds her arm around Katya’s neck to draw her into another kiss. Katya brushes Trixie’s hair back out of her face and lets her fingertips smooth over the shell of her ear. “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.”

“Katya, please. You’re so hot.”

That makes them both laugh. It’s still kind of strange, peculiar in the best way, to hear Trixie say things like that. Especially half-naked beneath her. The way her bare skin feels against Trixie’s when Katya leans down and their stomachs press together is so good that it makes her moan, and Trixie’s hips rock sharply up against Katya’s.

“You’re hot, too.” Katya says it like it’s a secret, even though they both already know. Trixie has caught her checking her out so many times. She’d always just shrug and smirk and double down, tilting her head and whistling while Trixie paraded around in a series of tiny tight dresses, wanting Katya to help her make a decision. “Trixie, you’re so fucking sexy I might die. You are way out of my league.”

“Let me tell you about you,” Trixie says, but Katya leans in and kisses her again before she can say anything else.

Later, maybe in the car on their drive home, she is very interested to hear all about what Trixie thinks. All the ways she has _been_ thinking about her. But right now Trixie is exhausted, and in pain, and so beautiful sprawled out beneath Katya. She just wants to make her feel so good.

Katya hooks her thumbs in the belt loops of Trixie’s jeans and tugs until her hips lift off the mattress. “Can I take these off you?” she asks, and Trixie makes a garbled noise of agreement. Actually doing it is a calamity. Trixie’s pants are always so tight, and she squirms to try and help as much as possible but Katya still has to yank to get them down her thighs. It makes Trixie laugh and she throws one arm over her eyes, her head tipped back so Katya can see right inside her mouth. She laughs too, because it is pretty ridiculous. She doesn’t know that she’s ever really laughed with anybody in bed, before.

They have to be extra careful with Trixie’s busted ankle, and Katya goes as slowly as she can but it still makes her cry out. Katya can’t imagine how she managed to get her pants on in the first place.

As soon as she’s out of them, Trixie hooks her leg over Katya’s thigh again and arches against her. Their room is so quiet and intimate. Katya can hear how heavy Trixie’s breathing has gotten, coming in these cute little puffs through her nose, and she’s hardly even touched her yet. She comes back to support herself with her palms planted either side of Trixie again and just looks down at her, their noses not quite touching. Katya gets to see how Trixie’s eyes widen when she lets her weight drop to rest against her. Trixie is so wet that Katya can feel it through her underwear, against the bottom of her bare stomach.

She kisses Trixie a little more, letting her hand travel all over her stomach and her tits. Trixie kisses back, and some of her hair gets into their mouths and makes them both laugh. Katya brushes it back for her, arranges it against the pillow. It’s so still and calm in the room that Katya is almost afraid to speak, so when Trixie gasps it feels like her heart lurches and then tumbles down into the pit of her stomach.

“Did you just hear that?”

“Hear what, baby?” Katya’s fingertips are flirting with the waistband of Trixie’s underwear, occasionally just tucking beneath the elastic to feel how hot her skin is underneath. “What’d you hear?”

Trixie lifts up on one elbow to frown at Katya. “A noise!”

“A _noise_?” Katya echoes. She can’t keep the teasing out of her voice, or off her face. She just feels so deliriously gentle and kind and good.

It makes Trixie’s face go all scrunchy and she swats at the inside of Katya’s bicep. “Yeah. Like what you were trying to do in the forest yesterday. I mean. . . a lot less ghoulish and unearthly than whatever that was, but-”

“You think it’s him?” Trixie narrows her eyes. “I’m so sorry, right, sure. Them. You think you heard Bigfoot?”

“I heard _something_. Don’t you think it might be significant?”

Katya studies Trixie for a moment. Her chest is flushed, her hair is already getting sort of matted together at the back of her head, and she’s stretched out underneath Katya in only her briefs. She’s the most gorgeous thing Katya has ever seen.

“I know what you’re trying to do, honey.” Katya says gently, and leans in to kiss Trixie again. “And I super appreciate the effort. I do. But the only thing I care about right now is making you come. Is that cool?”

“Oh, my god.”

Trixie’s head thuds back against the pillows and she closes her eyes. One of her hands lands at the back of Katya’s head, not forcing her in any particular direction so much as just holding her. Katya likes the way Trixie massages her scalp, likes the thought of her doing that while they’re curled up together on the couch or in one of their beds at home.

“Hey, baby,” Katya murmurs, and nuzzles her nose at Trixie’s hairline. “Look at me.”

She does, her eyes enormous and dark. They’re prettiest in the sunlight, when they’re run through with gold and green, but Katya likes them like this too. She pulls back enough that she can see Trixie’s whole face when she touches her. Katya starts to rub her through her underwear and Trixie makes a new noise, a wonderful noise. Her mouth is open and she’s staring at Katya like she’s never seen her before. And like she never wants to see anything else again.

Katya experiments with speed and direction and pressure, and when she finds the place that makes Trixie gasp and shiver, makes her hips stutter with electric urgency, she lets herself stay right there for a while. They kiss a little more, and it means Katya gets to hear and feel every tiny noise that Trixie makes. She’s so responsive and sweet and she rocks against Katya’s hand.

“Does that feel good?” Katya asks, and Trixie gives her the smallest _uh-huh_ and lets out a shaky breath. “Do you think maybe it could feel better?”

Trixie whines and pouts and then immediately dissolves into an arpeggio of giggles that Katya kisses right off of her. She can feel Trixie’s stomach still fluttering with laughter beneath her and she cradles her head and lets herself get lost in kissing Trixie again. There’s a gap in the voile panels and now that the fog has begun to burn away with the heat of the day, the room is bisected by sunlight. Katya would like to lie here all day long and watch it travel, watch Trixie’s body be turned slowly golden.

“Please touch me,” Trixie says, and then blinks a couple times like she’s surprised at herself.

Hearing her say that, hearing that Trixie wants her this much, makes something in Katya’s chest swoop and roll over. She kisses her, but she can’t stop smiling and it all falls apart right away. Instead, Katya moves down the bed to kneel between Trixie’s spread thighs. She hooks her fingers in the waistband of Trixie’s underwear on both sides and peels them down her legs, discards them out of the way at the foot of the bed. Trixie, suddenly pink with shyness, makes like she’s going to press her knees together and Katya stops her with a hand at the inside of each of her thighs.

“You are so beautiful, Trixie. I can’t believe I get to have you like this.”

Katya lets her left hand drift inwards, towards where Trixie is so slick and swollen, but she reaches down to circle Katya’s wrist in her fingers and tug. “Wait, wait. Come back up here. I wanna kiss you some more.”

“That’s really gay, baby,” Katya tells her, right before she leans in to kiss Trixie again. Every time she does, she thinks about all of the different kinds of kisses they’re going to get to have. Thinking about a future with Trixie doesn’t scare her at all; Trixie has always been a part of her future. She wants to do this, hunt monsters and then fuck Trixie in a too-small motel bed, every weekend for the rest of her life.

It feels kind of strange to only be shirtless while Trixie is totally naked beneath her, but her body is soft and sublime and Katya can’t get enough of touching her. She breaks away from their kiss to pull back and look at Trixie’s face, and she lets her hand move down to touch Trixie properly. It makes her let out a slow, shaky breath and she watches Katya, never breaks her gaze as Katya slides two fingers inside of her.

“Katya, _oh_ -” Trixie gasps when Katya curls her fingers and loops her arm around Katya’s neck. Her other hand is clutching at the sheets and her hips are shifting restlessly and without rhythm. “Oh, my god.”

“That’s good?”

Trixie huffs. “You know it is. God, I hate you so much.”

“Sure you do.” Katya makes a happy little humming noise and kisses whatever of Trixie she can reach. She lands at her temple and lives there for a while, stroking Trixie gently and nuzzling tiny kisses right at her hairline. Trixie is so flushed and pretty and her eyes keep closing like she doesn’t even know that she’s doing it.

Trixie is so responsive and enthusiastic. She lets Katya know exactly what feels good, with little moans and the way she twitches and the arch of her neck in search of Katya’s mouth. She’s so wet and hot and everything is so slippery. Katya adds a third finger and Trixie cries out and hides her face against Katya’s shoulder.

“I’m really close,” she says quietly, and her own hand moves down to bump against Katya’s. “Do you mind if-?”

“ _Please_.”

Trixie rubs at her clit with two fingers and Katya keeps working her own fingers inside of Trixie. She leans down to capture Trixie’s nipple between her teeth and Trixie gasps and jerks so violently she almost topples both of them right off the bed. When she comes she’s just as loud and just as beautiful as Katya expected. Her face goes flushed all the way to the tips of her ears, and she moans low in her throat as she clenches around Katya’s fingers and her hips lift up off the mattress.

It takes her a little while to come down, for her breathing to level out. Katya wraps one arm around Trixie’s waist and strokes her hair with her free hand, waiting for her to open her eyes. When she does, Katya grins so widely at her that she can feel how goofy she must look. Trixie laughs and lifts her head off the pillows to kiss Katya again.

Now that she’s not so focused on Trixie and making her feel good, Katya feels newly aware of her own need. She feels hot all over and she’s aching to be touched. “Trixie,” she says. “Please. I need- please.”

Katya doesn’t shave her legs, and Trixie runs her hand up the outside of Katya’s thigh in delight. They’re best friends, and neither of them have ever really gone into detail about their sex lives but Trixie does know that Katya doesn’t love penetration. She cups her, and even through her underwear and her pants it feels so good that Katya closes her eyes. She wriggles, impatient, and Trixie laughs at her.

“Tell me what feels good. Tell me what you like,” Trixie asks her.

If they had more time, if they were at home, Katya would ride Trixie’s face and bang the headboard against the wall until her neighbours complained. She’s looking forward to being noisy, and to making Trixie be loud as well, but they have so much time. Right now she just wants to come so fucking bad.

“I just want you to touch me.”

Trixie giggles and slides her hand around to grab Katya’s ass. “I think I can manage that. Can you get undressed?”

It has already stopped being strange to hear Trixie say that she wants her, to see Trixie still stretched out naked along the bed. Katya gets up and shimmies out of her jeans but leaves her underwear on. Trixie sits up and leans against the headboard, arranges the pillows so she’s comfortable, then pats the space between the V of her legs.

“C’mere,” she says. “God, Katya. It is unacceptable to me that you’re this hot. I know I’m gorgeous, but you. . . fuck.”

Katya laughs and settles herself between Trixie’s thighs, leaning back against her chest. Trixie gets her hand inside Katya’s underwear immediately to start stroking her and Katya drops her head back heavily against Trixie’s shoulder. It feels so good, and she is embarrassingly close already. Trixie’s other hand comes up to Katya’s tits and she squeezes through her bra.

“I’ve wanted to touch you like this for so long,” Trixie says quietly, her lips brushing against the shell of Katya’s ear. “Out here parading around in your underwear in front of me all the time, you fuckin’ bitch.”

She sounds so genuinely annoyed that Katya laughs and turns her head to try and see her. They kiss a little, but it’s awkward at this angle so Katya straightens up again and looks down her own body to watch Trixie’s hands on her.

“M’sorry, baby. I wasn’t trying to tease you.”

“I know you weren’t.” Trixie slides her hand up from Katya’s tits and into her hair. She grabs a handful of it right at the root and tugs until Katya whines and her hips jerk. “I can’t believe it took you this long to figure out that I want you.”

Katya takes a slow, careful breath and closes her eyes. “I didn’t even, you- you had to spell it out for me- oh, _god_ , Trixie. Please.”

“Is this enough?”

“Yes, oh my god.”

Trixie tugs on her hair again and keeps the same steady rhythm against Katya’s clit and she comes with a little yell. Trixie works her through it, gradually slowing the work of her fingers until she’s not moving at all, just letting Katya rock against her.

For a little while afterwards they just exist together in the quiet, listening to each other’s breathing levelling out. Trixie has both arms around Katya now and it’s nice to be held, nice to feel like she’s something precious. The world outside feels very far away, and Katya wonders if maybe everything will be different. If maybe Trixie won’t want her when she sees her in the sunlight.

“Hey,” Trixie murmurs.

Katya untangles herself from Trixie’s arms and climbs clumsily over her thigh to sit next to her instead. She pillows her cheek against Trixie’s shoulder and hums a small noise of acknowledgement. She has one of Trixie’s hands in both of hers now and she strokes along her fingers and tries very hard to stop making so many tiny, contented sounds.

It takes a little while for Trixie to speak again, and when she does, she says, “Katya, I’m in love with you.” It’s so quiet that it’s like it didn’t happen at all, but Katya’s whole body is flushed with pleasure. She pulls back to look at Trixie. Her eyes are huge and dark, but she looks so certain.

“You are?”

“Yeah.” Trixie presses her lips together and her eyebrows draw in and upwards like they’re tugged by a thread. “I know that’s a lot. You don’t have to say it back. I just really needed for you to hear it.”

Katya frames Trixie’s face in both hands and leans in to kiss her again. This time it’s much more urgent, wetter and messier, and when they break apart Katya holds Trixie right there so she can look at her. She’s her best friend, her favourite person in the world, and she feels so foolish for how long it’s taken them to get here.

“Of course I love you, Trixie. Of course I do.”

“Good,” Trixie says loudly, and Katya wheezes a laugh. “I’d have been real mad about it if you didn’t say it.”

Katya kisses her again for that and lets herself linger there, their noses pressed together. After a while Trixie’s skin breaks out in gooseflesh and they have to get up. They’re giggly and adolescent as they get dressed again. This time, Katya gets to kneel at Trixie’s feet and help her get her jeans over her swollen ankle. Her heart feels wide open and she can’t stop touching Trixie, holding her hand, kissing her cheeks and the crown of her head.

She leaves Trixie to finish packing up the last of their stuff while she checks out at the front desk. Katya is sure to tell the guy working this morning about how helpful the poor kid last night was, that he did a great job, and she promises she’ll leave the motel a favourable review. She feels bad about how obviously impatient she is, shifting her weight from foot to foot and drumming her fingers against the desk. It’s just that Trixie is waiting for her, sweet beautiful Trixie, and she gets to kiss her hello when she gets back to their room.

“Katya,” Trixie says as soon as she sees her coming across the parking lot. She’s in one of the Adirondack chairs with their luggage at her feet and she stands up slowly, only the toes of her injured foot touching the ground.

“Hey baby.” Katya loops both arms around her waist and kisses her softly. “What’s the matter?”

Trixie arranges a rogue curl back out of Katya’s face. “I want to be your girlfriend.”

“Oh!” Katya can’t do anything about her smile; her face is just unravelling with joy. “Yes. Obviously. You’re already my lesbian life partner, and now we’re fucking. What’d you think that meant?”

“We are already co-parenting a rodent,” Trixie says, and Katya snorts. “But, you know, apparently I have to explain things very clearly for you, since you have the cognitive processing capability of a toddler.”

Katya kisses Trixie again, and holds her firmly when she sways on one foot. When they separate they’re both smiling, and Katya slides her hands down to tuck them into Trixie’s back pockets. “You are so mean to me. I can’t believe I’m in love with you.”

In the car, as they start to drive along the main street out of town, Katya could swear she sees something in the rear view, like a shiver down the spine of the forest. All of the trees rippling. But Trixie is next to her in the passenger seat, her hand covering Katya’s on the gearshift and her head turned towards her too. Her cheeks are pink, wind-chapped, and she’s smiling.

“Okay?” she asks quietly, and squeezes Katya’s fingers.

“Yeah.” Katya clears her throat, and shifts her gaze to the road ahead. “Yeah. Let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's a wrap on this one! i can be found over on [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie). i would love to hear what you thought ♡


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